What is Service Management

System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager (SCCM), like the previous versions of the product, plays an important role in service management in the information technology (IT) world. As IT professionals, we are not responsible for every task required to accomplish a key business activity in our environments. However, we are an important piece of the IT service management process. IT is in the business of providing key capabilities, called services, to enable the business functions to achieve the goals of the business. This is one of the many reasons to leverage the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) or the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to optimize your IT investment and realize business value.

The idea behind MOF and ITIL is to align IT with the business goals by breaking down silos between IT departments with the ultimate goal of service excellence. Numerous groups fall under the IT department tag, but we often see many of them acting as separate departments rather than as one cohesive unit. Desktop support, application developers, server support, storage administrators, and so on are all members of IT, but they are not always as unified as they should be when delivering quality IT services. Often they lack clarity about who owns each component in the ultimate delivery of the IT service.

System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager was built with MOF and ITIL in mind, so we will start the book by describing these two frameworks and how they are central to the mission of the Microsoft System Center family of products. System Center Configuration Manager, or ConfigMgr, is much more than just a mechanism to deploy software. In this chapter, you will learn how we define IT service management and how MOF and ITIL can be the foundation for defining service management in your organization’s services throughout the entire lifecycle of those services. You will also learn about how all of the Microsoft System Center products map to service management and the new features of ConfigMgr.